Frederik Pohl is regarded as one of the greatest science-fiction writers living today. His name is synonymous with superb speculative fiction. Pohl was born on Nov. 26, 1919, in Brooklyn, N.Y. He fell in love with writing at an early age. "I wrote this poem for Amazing Stories when I was 15," he recalls. "It was accepted when I was 16, published when I was 17 and paid for when I was 18."

His long career in SF stretches over 65 years. At the age of 19, he was editing two magazines at the same time—Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. During the Golden Age of science fiction, Pohl also edited Galaxy, If and Worlds of Tomorrow. He has written over 100 books, including such SF classics as The Space Merchants, Gateway, Man Plus, The Voices of Heaven and Jem.

His recent works include Chasing Science and the three-part Eschaton Sequence (The Other End of Time, The Siege of Eternity and The Far Shore of Time).

The 82-year-old writer now lives in the suburbs of Chicago with his wife, Elizabeth Anne Hull. She teaches English at Harper College in Palatine, Ill.You are about to turn 82. How does that feel?

Pohl: Well, I never planned on being 82 and don't know exactly how it happened ... but I guess it's better than the alternative.Now that you are in your 80s, do you still stick with the four-pages-a-day regimen?

Pohl: Yes and no. A couple of years ago, I began having serious breathing problems and decided to quit smoking. This has helped my breathing, but ruined my writing at least temporarily: 60 years of writing with a cigarette burning in an ashtray beside me so fixed my physical behavior that I found it almost impossible to get any writing done. Over recent months, the situation has at last begun to improve, and I think I am back on track again.There are rumors that you are working on another Gateway book. Is this true? And how far are you into it?

Pohl: Yes, I'm working on another Heechee book. A couple of years ago Bob Silverberg, who is very persuasive when he wants to be, coaxed me to write a Heechee novelette for an anthology he was editing. My wife and I were cruising in the eastern Mediterranean, and I wrote a story on the ship. It turned out to be too long for his book, so I wrote another and sent it to him. Then I realized I had about 30,000 words worth of Heechee stories, and resolved to write some more and make them into a book. It will be called From Gateway to the Core and probably will be out late next year ... provided I finish writing it.

Gateway won the Hugo, the Nebula and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. It was also a bestseller (the book has gone into over 30th printing). Did you expect such recognition when you wrote it?

Pohl: I knew it was a good book. I didn't know that it would win all the awards, but I'm glad it did. I would have been disappointed if somebody else—some other book—had beaten it out. It's a good book.

I've published a lot of books. I'm not crazy about all of them. There are maybe 20 or 30 that I like, and of those Gateway is maybe the one I like best, or within the top couple, anyhow. I change from day to day. I also like Chernobyl a lot and The Years of the City, but Gateway, I think, is about as good as I get.You're a fan, writer and collector, and you were at one time, a book and magazine editor, agent and even president of the Science Fiction Writers of America and of World SF, the international organization of people with professional connections to science fiction. Of all those roles, which ones did you enjoy the most?

Pohl: Writer. All the others are work. There's a lot of pleasure to being editor under the right circumstances, but it doesn't compare to being a writer.How do you still maintain an active fascination for SF?

Pohl: What keeps me interested in SF is science—that is, the constantly unfolding observational and theoretical knowledge of how the universe works—and how this can be expressed SF stories.Are there trends in SF you don't care for?

Pohl: I like all kinds of science fiction. What I don't care for is most combinations of SF and fantasy—to me they have nothing to say that C.L. Moore didn't say better long ago.On the same topic, are there trends in science fiction that you think will become bigger?

Pohl: The thing about SF is that it isn't monolithic and doesn't have unique trends; it goes in all directions at once, as individual writers think of new things to explore and others learn from them.You've collaborated with other writers, such as C.M. Kornbluth, Isaac Asimov, Jack Williamson, Lester del Rey and L. Ron Hubbard. What is the secret to a successful collaboration?

Pohl: Tremendous patience [laughs]. You have to be really friendly. It's a lot like a marriage in many ways. One, you don't know what you're getting into until you're in it. The other, there are inevitable conflicts in style and interest—I don't mean writing style, but in working. Sometimes they can be fatal.

The one novel I wrote with Lester del Rey, which was called Preferred Risk, took a year out of my life. It's a terrible book. If you come across it, don't read it. It was originally published under a pen name and I used to lie about it. Then Lester's wife, Judy Lynn del Rey, re-published it with Del Rey Books, and put our names on it—so I can't deny it anymore [laughs].In your work, you've often made such pointed comments on political and social matters.

Pohl: I was always interested in society. I was a radical when I was a teen-ager, and I've been a Democrat ever since, which is basically a kind of radical compared to the Republicans. I've done a lot of reading on various political thinkers, all of the Utopians, and the kind of societies that I thought would be something to write about.

There's no doubt that there are things terribly wrong with our society. The hard part is trying to figure out how to make them better, which I haven't succeed in doing. But one of the advantages of writing SF is that you can think about how other societies might work if the rules were a little different, and then write a story and see how people would be affected by that. Most of the science fiction I like best is like that. Although there's also quite a lot that's sort of a celebration of science and investigations into the unknown. But I do spend a lot of time writing social—what they call social-science fiction and propose to go on doing so.Satire is a predominant element in your work. Who were the satirists that you read?

Pohl: Well, the first fiction I ever remember reading was by Voltaire, his Candide. My mother gave it to me when I was about eight. She thought it was a fairy tale. Voltaire was one of the greatest satirists of the Enlightenment, and I read Jonathan Swift and all the classic satirists.

There's an element of satire in most of the SF I like best, when I was beginning to read it. Even Edgar Rice Burroughs, in his Mars books, is really satirizing Earthly customs, religions and politics. Of course, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's novel, was pure satire, and there were a couple of magazine writers: a man named Stanton A. Coblentz, in particular, who wrote a sort of heavy-handed, crude, but sometimes funny satirical SF. I guess they all influenced me, but then everything I read influenced me. What are some of your favorite sci-fi films over the years?

Pohl: I think the one I like best of all is Things to Come. It came out in 1936 and it just knocked me over. I think I saw it about 25 or 30 times.

I also like Forbidden Planet. I'd been offered the chance to write a book version of the film before it came out and I didn't think it was going to be any good so I turned it down. Then when I saw it in the theater I kicked myself because it was really one of the very few science fiction movies with a story that could have been good in print.

The first SF movie I ever saw was called Just Imagine. It was released in 1930. It was about the incredible far future of 1980. In it, New York was all skyscrapers and people lived on pills. When a couple wanted a baby, they'd put a quarter into a machine and a baby came out. It was also Maureen O'Sullivan's first movie and I fell madly in love with her.In your lifetime, you've seen the invention of computers, rockets go to the moon, you've seen DVDs, cellular phones, microwave ovens, all these scientific inventions and breakthroughs. Does SF sometimes get dwarfed by science fact?

Pohl: No. All these came out of science fiction. I mean, none of them took me by surprise, because I had been reading about them for years before they happened. I was in Paris in August 1945, and I was getting a haircut in a barber shop off the Champs Elysees. And I was looking over the shoulder of the man next to me, and he had a newspaper with a big headline, "Le Bomb Atomique." And the first thing I thought was that these crazy French will print anything in their papers. And then when I looked a little closer and realized it actually had happened. I felt—well, I knew it all along.

Everybody who read science fiction knew that this was a good possibility. There are several kinds of science fiction that you can't write anymore. You can't write about the first intelligent robot, the first trip to the moon or the first nuclear war, because they've happened, but the consequences of all these things are just getting clearer every day.

You recently wrote The Other End of Time, The Siege of Eternity and The Far Shore of Time, which is part of Eschaton Sequence. What is the Eschaton?

Pohl: Eschaton is a theological term meaning when everything becomes all different, all the rules change. It has been used by physicist Frank Tippler to describe the time when the universe has expanded as far as it can, and then it collapses back into itself again in what they call The Big Crush. When it's all back in one piece again, that's what he calls the Eschaton.What do you think the next century will be like?

Pohl: We can't do that in a 30-minute interview [laughs]. One of the local Chicago newspapers asked me to name five things which will no longer be around in the year 2210. I said, "There will not be any computers, television sets, traffic jams, hospitals or airports." That I'm pretty sure of. Whatever else happens, depends a great deal on what people make happen.

There's been a lot of attempts by pretty bright and well-informed people to figure out methodologies for forecasting the future. They figured out a whole bunch of really snazzy ones; Delphi Herman Kahn scenario writing, methodological mapping, trendline extrapolations, etc. All had one thing in common—none of them work.

A man named Dennis Gabor, who is best known for inventing the hologram, and is also one of the leaders in the future-studies discipline, summarized it all when he said, "It is impossible to predict the future, the best we can do is invent it." You really can't say much about what will be in the 21st or 22nd century, you can only say what can be and what may be, and there are certain things there won't be, like the five I mentioned.On the same theme, what kind of "futuribles" intrigue you or concern you these days?

Pohl: "Futuribles" that interest me right now: (a) seeing just how bad the weather is going to get with the global warming [Editor's Note: To find out more about this, read Pohl's and Isaac Asimov's Our Angry Earth]; (b) trying to imagine what the world will be like when computers are tinier than a button, cheaper than a jelly bean and in absolutely everything we own; (c) anticipating the results of the coming stock market megacrash.What was the inspiration behind Man Plus?

Pohl: The original inspiration did not come from me, but from a woman who wanted to produce a film. She had the idea that the movie should be about cyborgs in space. That's all she had to say about it.

I spend a couple of months trying to write a screenplay, just a treatment for her. It went nowhere. I never got paid for it either [laughs]. After I put all this work into it, I decided to make a novel out of it.What are your thoughts on your sequel with Thomas T. Thomas, Mars Plus?

Pohl: The sequel came about because Jim Baen, the publisher of Baen Books, took me out to lunch one day and got me loaded and said: "I want you to write an outline for a sequel and have someone else write the book," and I agreed. I haven't done that very often and I'm not sure I want to do it again.

Actually, I thought Thomas T. Thomas did a very good job of writing, not the book that I would have written, but a satisfactory book based on my ideas. I would have written it differently, but he did things I wouldn't have thought to do. He had some nice touches in it.Venus has been the setting for several of your novels. Does the planet have any special appeal for you?

Pohl: Venus is closet to the Earth in most respects. The only ways in which it's different are the temperature and the air pressure. And that, apparently, is because it's about 40 million miles closer to the Sun. So, if you could deal with the temperature, which is hot enough to melt lead, or the air pressure, which is enough to crush any normal living thing, it would be a good planet to live on.

I've written about, I guess, every planet in the solar system that I thought could possibly support anybody walking on its surface. The big ones—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune—don't seem to have any surface so they don't count, but you can put stories on Mars, Venus, Mercury, Pluto, them moon, Callisto, Ganymede and various other satellites. But Venus, I think, is logical—it's an easy place to get to from here. It's the closest planet. Most of the time it's even closer than Mars. I have no special other fondness for it.Anything else you would like to add?

Pohl: I'm just back from a Panama Canal cruise, on which I did a lot of writing. (Cruises are turning out to be about my best writing venue—the phone doesn't ring.) The Canal trip was special. I spent the first year of my life in the Zone, in the town of Gatun, where my father had a job working on the locks, and had never been back since. So I did want to see the place, and loved the trip.